Duncton Found (88 page)

“I was meant to come here,” she kept saying to herself, “and I was meant to come without Beechen at first so that I can get to know it in my own way. He said he’d come back, and I know he will, and I know that if I’m true to the Stone then this system will look after me.”

The trees ahead thinned, they clambered over the surface roots of another beech tree, the ground dropped away slightly, and there, before them through the trees, they saw the great Stone of Duncton, its colour greener and more brown than the beech trees, but its surface having the same strange shining quality they held.

Remembering Mayweed’s reluctance to go first on to the Pasture slopes, Romney went to the front saying, “I’ll take the lead, for it’ll not be a pleasant sight about the Stone.”

On they went, past the last tree before the clearing and then out through the undergrowth before the Stone itself. Mayweed kept his snout low, and Mistle could hardly bear to look.

But when they did so it was somehow not so bad as it had seemed on the slopes. There were bodies there, and owls and rooks had been, but somehow the trees surrounding them, and the Stone especially, put them into a different proportion. The clearing was peaceful, nature would take its course and the bodies would be gone.

“Madam and Sir, if Tryfan has survived then where is he?” said Mayweed. “For he is not here.”

Mistle stared up at the Stone whose face seemed to catch light in strange and subtle ways, even on a dull day like this. Romney shifted about uncomfortably.

Mayweed snouted about a bit, stanced with his head on one side, ran hither and thither and finally came back, stopped, turned, and stared north out of the clearing.

“Please to follow me,” he said, “and quietly.”

As dusk fell on Longest Night and the grikes came, Bailey had not been in the Stone clearing, but hurrying over the surface of the Ancient System in the company of Marram.

He should have been at the Stone but he had grown bored and, seeing Marram setting off to tell Skint and Smithills that everymole was waiting for them, had gone along to keep him company.

Neither had suspected anything was wrong until they reached the edge of the High Wood and heard shouts and commands coming from the slopes below. Bailey had peered out from the cover of the wood with Marram and been faced by the most terrifying sight coming up out of the gloom below that he had ever seen.

Dozens and dozens of grike guardmoles came inexorably up towards them. Even as they saw them they heard grikes crashing into the wood on either side of them and knew it was too late to even attempt to get down and reach Skint and Smithills, assuming they were still there.

“We must go and warn the others,” said Marram, turning and starting back the way they had come.

But it was too late, the moles on either flank had heard them and even as they rushed back towards the Stone clearing the grikes turned to cut them off, hissing commands to each other. Bailey felt he was about to die.

“Hide there!” commanded Marram, “There! Now! And don’t move whatever happens,
whatever happens
.” Then, shocked and in a daze, Bailey scurried into the shelter of some roots and dog’s mercury. Even as Marram turned from him and had moved no more than a few paces away, he was confronted by grikes coming from all directions.

Bailey heard a strong confident voice say, “Here’s the one we heard.”

“What’s your name, Stone-lover?” said another.

“Marram, I....”

Then there was a sickening thump, a weak diminishing cry, a grunt, and then the grikes rushed on as more came up behind them and Bailey’s world seemed to turn mad around him.

He began to shiver and shake, and as moles went here and there and all about, he covered his head with his paws and kept them there for what seemed an interminable time.

Then as things fell silent and the last of the grikes seemed to have run past, Bailey heard a rasping voice he did not at first recognise.

“Bailey!” it called, and it might have been death itself speaking his name.

He dared to peer out of his hiding place and saw poor Marram stretched out and dying.

“Bailey,” rasped Marram, “hide. Go down into the Ancient System. Hide. One must survive: you. Hide.”

“But Marram, b-b-but....”

“Bailey...” It was the last word Marram said, for he coughed and died even as Bailey reached out to him.

Nothing can describe the talon-crumbling, mind-numbing, heart-stopping panic that Bailey then felt. Not a thought did he have for Tryfan and the other moles in the clearing nor, as he turned and rushed blindly from Marram, for anymole else but himself. He ran about, stumbled over roots, crashed into fallen branches and then, when he heard a grike call out, “Whatmole’s that?” he tried to scrabble at the leaf litter and chalky soil beneath him and make good his escape.

“Hey! You!”

He gave up trying to delve and dashed off, first here and then there until he tried to delve once more, desperate to escape from the death that seemed about to descend on him.

Once more the ground was too hard. He heard moles coming for him and he ran blindly on again until he scented the ground below was more moist, and he delved down and succeeded in tunnelling out of sight. His breath came out in grunts of fear despite all attempts to silence it, his mouth was full of soil and he pushed wildly on. Then he stopped, listened, realised nomole was following, pushed a paw forward and found himself tumbling headlong into a pitch-black tunnel.

“Where’s the bugger gone?”

He heard death’s hard voice on the surface above, soil and litter dropped down into the black space around him, sweat poured down his face, and then the voices were gone.

He stayed quite still until the cold began to get at him and, feeling his way along in the blackest tunnels he had ever known, he began to explore. Had he not been to the Ancient System before, which he had as a pup in Henbane’s day, and more recently when Mayweed had shown him where his father Spindle had hidden his own and Tryfan’s texts, he might have felt more nervous, for the windsound is most attenuated and strange, and that night seemed full of rushing above, and ominous cries and screams.

At first he did not know where he was or where he could go, but after a long and increasingly miserable wandering he came to a tunnel he knew, lit by moonlight. He decided to go to the secret place Mayweed had shown him and somehow he got himself to it: a burrow hidden among the roots of a beech tree, itself empty but leading most cleverly by way of a tilted flint through a concealed entrance to a safe burrow for texts.

There he stanced down and stayed still, listening, very afraid, unable to move more. Finally he dozed off, only to wake when new sounds came: moles laughing and joking, their voices guttural. He knew them to be grikes.

He realised that they were leaving, but he did not dare move. Fear of them had been replaced by fear of what they had left behind. It was not until two long, wretched days had passed that thirst and hunger finally drove him out of the chalky burrow and from among the bark texts where he had felt safest, and up on to the surface. He crept about, gulped down some water he found in the interstices of a tree root, and grubbed timidly about for some food, starting at every slightest sound.

The wood was silent, the trees still, the place felt dead. Eventually, not knowing what else to do, he went timidly to the Stone, and what he found there was unspeakably worse than anything he could have imagined. It seemed that everymole he had ever loved was lying there, cold, stiff, frosted over, taloned and crushed to death before the Stone.

He stared numbly about him, at the wide empty clearing, at the bodies, at the Stone, and at the bodies again. Feverfew, Madder, Teasel all crumpled... they were all there, all dead.

“Bailey...?”

For a moment his heart seemed to stop and he half screamed in fear.

“Bailey....”

The voice was familiar and yet unlike anything he had heard before, coming from a place Bailey had no wish to go.

“Bailey,” it said. And if Bailey could have died himself he would have done so then, so fearful was he of turning and peering into the shadows from which that voice came. But then he heard the slow drag of steps behind him in the gloom and terror made him turn and stare in horror at the bloody apparition that came.

Tryfan, blinded. His face and what had been his eyes all open and raw, his face fur no better than gore, his paws bespattered with his own blood.

“Is it Bailey?”

“Yes,” whispered Bailey. “What have they done to you? What have they done to Duncton?”

“I knew you were safe, Bailey. I knew you were hiding. Where did you go?”

How could he speak so calmly? Bailey answered him, not knowing where to look. Blankly he told him about Marram, and about how he had hidden in the Ancient System.

Only after that did Bailey come to himself sufficiently to ask of Tryfan himself, and what had happened.

“I am in pain, though not as much as it was. The cold has helped me, Bailey. I have found food, for my snout is unharmed, but I could not find water. Take me somewhere I can drink. You must guide me....”

Slowly, pathetically, still barely aware of what was happening, Bailey led Tryfan along to where he himself had found water and helped the old mole drink.

“Now keep me warm, Bailey, for I must sleep, and then I shall need your help. Do not be afraid, mole.”

“I feel ashamed,” said Bailey suddenly.

“No, mole, there is no time for that now. The Stone has protected you as, in its own terrible way, it protected me. We still have our tasks.”

“But you can’t do anything,” said Bailey bitterly.

“There is one thing I can do, and I shall need your help to do it, but I must sleep first... Now keep me warm....”

Bailey did his best for the mole who had given so much of his life to so many, and for the next few hours he felt each painful breath, each suffering shudder as if it were his own.

Once during that first night, Bailey found himself crying for Tryfan and the old mole stirred and woke and said, “Bailey, do not cry for me. I can bear this pain and darkness. I bore it before when Rune’s sideem hurt me in Whern; oh yes, I can bear it... weep not for me.”

Dawn came and Tryfan stirred and said, “Now find me food and lead me to the place to drink again.” When Bailey had done that, Tryfan said, “Now listen, mole, and do as I say. You have seen the texts hidden in the Ancient System and on what they are scribed. Go now to the Eastside and find me some bark of silver birch. Do it now. I shall not move, but wait for you impatiently. Go now....”

Bailey went, and got the bark, and came back and found Tryfan stanced where he had been before.

“Now, mole, guide my paw to the bark and keep it still for I must scribe one last time. Why, I thought the Rule I made was the final thing but it cannot be! One day moles shall live in this place again, one day a community will be here. They must know what happened, and be warned of what can be. They must know that not one single mole who lived here renounced the Stone. Not one! Scribing of it is what your father Spindle would have done. Then help me, as he would, and if my talons slur off the folio, buffet me and keep me to my task.”

Then, despite everything, Tryfan found the strength to scribe a final text, so that future moles might know of the events that had led up to that Longest Night, and on the night itself. In all of scribemole history, perhaps, no text is more moving or more fearful for the mole who snouts it than that one, scribed, it seems, from the heart of a dying mole. Rough, hard to make sense of in places, torn, scribed out of pain by a mole who believed in the future.

With passion and anger was it scribed, and yet, strange as it has seemed to some, it never once scribes badly of the Word or even of the grike guardmoles. Rather it talks of a mole called Lucerne, and one named Drule, and how they lost their way, led others astray, and why that might have been.

It tells of moles who would not renounce the Stone even in the face of death, and names them all, one by one, and describes each affectionately, their good parts and their bad. It finally commends the mole Bailey, who helped the scribemole make his final testament, and asks for the prayers of those who follow. It counsels moles to reflect that even when all seems lost to mole, all hopeless, the Stone may yet bring comfort and encouragement to moles with faith; and as Bailey had come out of the darkness to help him, so others struck down may hope that they are not abandoned.

For two days Tryfan made a scribing which got progressively more slow, and Bailey knew him to be a dying mole, for towards the end he could barely move his paw and Bailey had to hold his talons as he scribed.

“... And you shall not be abandoned, for the Stone is with you and at your flank, and attends you. Wait and you shall hear its Silence. This was scribed by Tryfan of Duncton, ordained by Boswell in Uffington.” So ends the final testament of Tryfan.

When it was done, Tryfan said, “Now, mole, I have completed it and it is well. Take it to that hiding place you know, and then return to me, for I have one last request to ask of you. Hurry, mole, for the darkness comes on my mind and I begin to be afraid. Hurry now.”